What if... it's safe for me to stop?

Learning to trust in the inherent safety of my life

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charcoal on paper

I have been trying to write this post all week in between endless medical appointments and lost hours. What words I can manage are clipped and foggy and I stare at them now, disorientated, like I’m looking a long way down a well.

Like a faint train rattling, rattling, the same thoughts have run back and forth: must write a post, must find something to say that people will enjoy, must make it work, must keep going. I have looked down the list of my twelve new thoughts blankly. The woman who wrote them feels very distant.

The only solution I could come up with is the one I hate most: write anyway. Be prepared to be vulnerable. Be prepared to be sub-par, imperfect. Be prepared to fail. And so here I am.

The thought I’ve been trying to pull close to me this month has been, “I only have to do a little bit.” I have discovered anew how profoundly difficult I find this; I am still so often pulled between all or nothing. On Sunday, I started a 100 Day Project with the aim to paint a simple shape every day as another experiment in showing up, showing up badly if need be, and four days in, the victory of sustaining something even that long has made me teary with pride.

(you can find and follow it here — a shape and few words every day)

shaped

But “I only have to do a little bit” is not the thought I want to write about today. I still have a lot of work to do there. I still need to feel my way through to its edges. No, I want to write about something else first.